ABSTRACT
It may be about time we fully acknowledge the novelist's or poet's fiction in our midst for what it really is. We already admit imaginative reconstructions in social science if they are called hypotheses and if the claim is made that they are testable. But what if the hypothesis itself is made up of detailed, concrete observation? What if it looks like Cornerville, a mythic sage, or a long prose poem? What if it is made of human beings, their homes, their meanings, their dialogues, their sciences, the chaos of their self-reflections, the evocative specificity of their lives?
